Posts Tagged 'Usage'

SoftLayer has over 1,750 Gbit/s of network capacity. In each of our data centers and points of presence, we have an extensive library of peering relationships and multiple 10 Gbit/s connections to independent Tier 1 carriers. We operate one of the fastest, most reliable networks on the planet, and our customers love it:

Wow these new Softlayer servers are amazingly fast! No more lag in EU! ;)

From a network operations standpoint, that means we have our work cut out for us to keep everything running smoothly while continuing to build the network to accommodate a steady increase in customer demand. It might be easier to rest on our laurels to simply maintain what we already have in place, but when you look at the trend of bandwidth usage over the past 18 months, you'll see why we need to be proactive about expanding our network:

The purple line above plots the 95th percentile of weekly outbound bandwidth utilization on the SoftLayer network, and the red line shows the linear trend of that consumption over time. From week to week, the total usage appears relatively consistent, growing at a steady rate, but when you look a little deeper, you get a better picture of how dynamic our network actually is:

The animated gif above shows the 2-hour average of bandwidth usage on our entire network over a seven-week period (times in CDT). As you can see, on a day-to-day basis, consumption fluctuates pretty significantly. The NOC (Network Operations Center) needs to be able to accommodate every spike of usage at any time of day, and our network engineering and strategy teams have to stay ahead of the game when it comes to planning points of presence and increasing bandwidth capacity to accommodate our customers' ever-expanding needs.

But wait. There's more.

Let's go one level deeper and look a graph of the 95th percentile bandwidth usage on 5-minute intervals from one week in a single data center:

The variations in usage are even more dramatic. Because we have thirteen data centers geographically dispersed around the world with an international customer base, the variations you see in total bandwidth utilization understate the complexity of our network's bandwidth usage. Customers targeting the Asian market might host content in SNG01, and the peaks in bandwidth consumption from Singapore will counterbalance the valleys of consumption at the same time in the United States and Europe.

With that in mind, here's a challenge for you: Looking at the graph above, if the times listed are in CDT, which data center do you think that data came from?

It would be interesting to look at weekly usage trends, how those trends are changing and what those trends tell us about our customer base, but that assessment would probably be "information overload" in this post, so I'll save that for another day.

-Dani

P.S. If you came to this post expecting to see "a big truck" or "a series of tubes," I'm sorry I let you down.

A couple days ago, I took my daughter to her favorite store. We picked up a fair amount and on the way to the car she asked a simple question, or so I thought. “Why did they only fill these bags half way”. Confused I looked at the bags and realized she was holding a bag which had a large stuffed bear in it and was looking at a bag less than half full of canned food.

Being the person I am, rather than attempt to explain this to her I wanted to let her try and figure it out for herself so she would understand it better. When we got home, I filled the rest of the bag with cans and had her try and pick it up, as I expected the bag broke in her hands. I explained to her that the cans were much heavier then the bag. She still doesn’t quite understand the concept that the bag has 2 limits, size and weight but she is starting to understand this concept.

I thought about this story this morning when I started working on a project of determining how many containers a Virtuozzo server could handle based on its system requirements. Just like the bag, a Virtuozzo system has multiple limitations that need to be observed, the size of the containers as well as their “weight”. In this situation “weight” would be the drain on overall system resources. When attempting to determine how many containers a system can handle, you need to take into account not only how many will fit size wise, but also how much of the overall system resources each container will require.

It turns out this question is much easier to ask then to answer. You can take a small server such as a dual core with 4GB of RAM and put 20 or even 30 containers onto the server and have it run flawlessly when those containers are small and do not require much in the way of system recourses. At the same time however I can take a quad proc quad core with 64GB of RAM and grind it to a halt with 1 or 2 containers.

At the end of the day, I have found that you can make just about anything work, but before you attempt to determine what hardware you will need to run a Virtuozzo server, it’s a good idea to have an estimate of what you expect the containers to be doing. What could be worse than spending hours configuring a server and getting it online only to watch it grind to a halt because there are just too many containers completely saturating your system resources?

With the recent releases of Google's Chrome (Sept 2), Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 (Aug 28), Mozilla's Firefox 3 (June 17), not to mention all the legacy browsers many of which are still in use. If you are not a web developer, you are probably thinking why should I care what web browser people are using? Believe me you should, the majority of SoftLayer’s customers run a business and with that have a website which must be displayed on, you guessed it, a web browser.

1. Layout/Rendering Engine
This could be one of the biggest differences between the browsers, a layout/rendering engine is what the browser uses to parse the html and display your web pages. Although there are numerous specifications for various types of content (HTML, XHTML, images, etc..) each of the engines seem to render it slightly different based on their interpretation of the specification documents.

But don’t take my word for it go check the ACID website or the screenshots of the ACID tests in different web browsers.

2. Your Privacy
Most of the front runners in the browser wars are sending your usage and machine specifications back to the mother ship. What they are doing with the information once they get it, who knows. But, with Google being the front runner in search and ads, with the addition of Google Chrome, they pretty much can monitor all web usage for anyone using their product. Please get out the tin foil hats now ☺

3. Usage / Front Runner
Based off most of the statistics I have seen IE 6, IE 7, Firefox 2, Firefox 3 are the front runners, with a few stragglers using Safari and Opera. But I bet things will be changing and Chrome will be coming up in usage ranks over the next few months as well as IE 8 once it is released from Beta.

At SoftLayer we test on all the major front runners in the browser wars for our web presence. I will be grabbing the popcorn and watching the show, things are about to get hectic in this area. Whether it is good or bad; users are getting more options in the browser market.